I bought a Lenovo 430K with Windows 7 Home Premium and upgraded it to Windows 8 Pro. I created a DVD from which I installed the Windows 8 Pro upgrade. I'm underwhelmed with Windows 8, however. I want to install Linux as the host OS and run Windows 8 Pro as a guest OS.

Will the Windows 8 Pro DVD that I created install Windows 8 Pro in a virtual machine, or would that virtual machine have to have Windows 7 installed first in order to install the upgrade?

2 Answers
2

You can do this. It's just that you still need a Windows license of some kind to "anchor" your Windows 8 upgrade.

In this case, you have the OEM Windows 7 Home Premium license that shipped with your computer. This license cannot be moved to another computer, but with linux as the base OS I believe it is still okay to use the OEM license in a virtual machine on that same computer, and therefore it can serve as the anchor for your Windows 8 upgrade.

He will be unable to install the Windows 7 Dell OEM license on the virtual machine. So unless he has some other non-oem Windows license he wouldn't be able to install Windows 8 on his virtual machine and have a valid license per the user agreement.
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RamhoundNov 5 '12 at 17:40

@Ramhound you don't need to install Windows 7 to use it for an upgrade... you just have to be able to enter the license key during the Windows 8 install. The question is then whether it will reject the key at that time, and if it does whether or not phone activation will be able to get around it.
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Joel CoehoornNov 5 '12 at 18:07